Talks - How Can We See God?

How Can We See God?

Path to Siva, Lesson 13

How Can We See God?

Path to Siva, Lesson 13

Satguru Bodhinatha Veylanswami
, 2017-01-21

The divine is in everyone. "See everyone as God." Even in the terrorist, even in the criminal, the seed of divinity is there. Over many lifetimes that divinity is supposed to grow. Bring in devotion, that moves out emotion, displaces anger. As Chellapaswami said: "Oru pollaappum illai." We should accept everything that happens because nothing is wrong.

Path to Siva, Lesson 13.

Master Course Trilogy, Dancing with Siva, Sloka 3

Unedited Transcript:

Good morning everyone.

We're looking this morning at Lesson 13 from our book Path to Siva. It's entitled: "How Can We See God?"

"Saivism teaches us that God Siva is knowable and we can experience Him right here and now. It is not just a matter of faith. Satguru Yogaswami declared, 'See God in everything. You are in God. God is within you. God is in everyone. See Him there.' It takes much meditation to find God Siva in all things, through all things. Gurudeva taught, 'He is there as the Soul of each soul. You can open your inner eye and see Him in others, see Him in the world as the world.' Perhaps the easiest place to start seeing God is in great religious teachers. We feel a spiritual aura about them that is uplifting. We see a light in their eyes that we do not see in others. The mere sound of their words encourages us to live a more spiritual life. Another way to see God is to look deeply into the eyes of another person. Look beyond the personality, go deeper than his or her intellect and see the pure life energy, which is God. This practice does not stop with people but can also include seeing the life energy in trees, birds and animals. Doing this, you discover that God is our life. God is the life in all beings. Becoming aware of this life energy in all that lives is becoming aware of God's presence. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad explains: 'He who knows God as the Life of life, the Eye of the eye, the Ear of the ear, the Mind of the mind, he indeed comprehends fully the Cause of all causes.' A third place to look for God is in the Hindu temple. In powerful temples you can sense the Deity's presence in the enshrined murti, and even catch a glimpse of His divine form during the puja. This is done with your third eye, your inner eye of divine sight. Many people, not just saints and sages, have seen God in such mystical visions."

Interesting idea that the divine is within everyone. When I meet with the Hindu families you can tell the adults always have that perspective. You know they're greeting each other, greeting me and definitely with the idea that the divine is within each of us. And generally, the kids, even the older kids, have this same attitude but sometimes you find older kids who don't have it. You can tell. If they're doing namaskar they're doing namaskar one fleshy being to another fleshy being; you know, there's no sense of divinity in their greeting. So, sometimes that idea doesn't just get passed on from one generation to the next but usually it is.

There's an interesting way to apply this idea and it's to apply it to everyone. In other words, there's a tendency in human nature to categorize people into: Those are good people; those are people with divinity within them and then there's these other people. But, that's not what we're supposed to be doing. Cause then we start gossiping about the other people, we're criticizing the other people cause they don't see the divine in them. That's where the challenge is, we need to see the divine even in people we tend to criticize.

So this is Yogaswami's quote on that:

See God is...

"See everyone as God. Don't say, 'This man is a robber. That one is a womanizer. The man over there a drunkard.' This man is God. That man is God. God is within everyone. The seed is there. See that and ignore the rest."

So that's a very important Hindu point of view that even in the terrorist, even in the criminal, the seed of divinity is there. And the Hindu approach to that is a multi-lifetime approach to try and strengthen that seed, to have more of that divinity present and less of the troublesome, less of that nature present. We don't give up on the person. We try and encourage the person to improve even if they're really a negative person. They're supposed to improve over many lifetimes and that divinity is supposed to grow. That's the Hindu perspective.

Here the next verse, in the Tirumantiram and it uses the Tamil word "uyir." Uyir means the soul and life. And the related word is "uyirkuyir" that's two uyir's back to back. And then can translate that as: God who is the soul of the soul, the God who is the life of the life. In other words the idea here, God is the soul of the soul, in English it takes a lot of words but in Tamil it's one word. God as the soul of the soul is uyirkuyir. So there's lots of great words like that in the Tamil lexicon. I will not attempt to read the Tamil on this verse; it's a little hard for me. But the first line is on uyirkuyir:

"Being the Life of life is splendorous jnana worship."

So that's being uyirkuyir. A jnani is someone who is the life of life.

"Beholding the Light of life is great yoga worship."

So in yoga, we're not the Life of life, we're close to that, but this light is manifesting as inner light. So we're perceiving the Life of life one step down as inner light in the stage of yoga. Then we come down one more stage:

"Giving life by invocation is external worship."

That's the idea that doing puja, you know, we're giving life. We're bringing life in to the murti. That's the idea. That gesture means bringing. We're inviting the Deity to come into the murti. So we're dealing with life in that sense. We're bringing it into the murti.

Then there's the last line which is interesting. Started out it sounded very neutral.

"Expressing adoration is charya."

Sounds good, "Expressing adoration is charya" very general. That's the translation by B. Natarajan which we got back when, mid-seventies I guess. Quite a while ago. Then a few years ago a new edition of Tirumantiram came out by the Babaji Kriya Yoga Sangam and that verse was translated:

"Love that shuts anger is the worship of Siva."

So our original translation didn't even have the word anger in it. So B. Natarajan was fudging there for some reason.

That the Tamil word is "ceyir" which means anger or rage. And is supposed to shut it out, shutting out ceyir. One of our translators, Sabharatnam Sivacharya wouldn't translate this, more of a process, more of a commentary than a translation so he puts a extra words in there.

His translation is: "The worship of Siva pertaining to the charya path is to be with pure and spontaneous love which wards of anger, lust and other such vices and which renders fitness to the devotees to do services without expecting any benefit or reward."

So he got everything in there.

Well we have revised our translation, it now reads: "Adoration that displaces anger is charya worship."

That's a nice way of saying it, how we bring forth devotion to the point where it moves the anger out. Anger is there and we bring in devotion that displaces the anger. So we're not just calming down the emotion, this or that, we're actually moving it out or displacing it by bringing in devotion.

One of the reasons anger is present is the inability to accept what is as what should be occurring. We're rejecting what's happening and saying: This shouldn't be. This, I'm working very hard and what I was working didn't work out. This shouldn't be. These people are mistreating me when there's no reason for them to be mistreating, it shouldn't be. I have this big problem in my life; why should I have this problem? I've been a good person. It shouldn't be.

Well we're not accepting what's occurring to us and that gets us disturbed which can lead to anger, inability to accept.

There's a simple phrase from Chellappaswami in our lineage. He says: "Oru pollaappum illai." Even one thing isn't wrong. That's a simple way of saying we should be accepting everything that happens because nothing's wrong. Well why isn't it wrong? Because we've attracted it to us. It's in our karma or we've attracted it to us as a family or we've attracted it to us as a nation or we've attracted it to us as a world because of what we've done in the past. Each of us is a big magnet as I've often said and we attract these experiences to us. What seems to be motivated externally is actually coming from us. So there's a nice writing on that in Dancing with Siva, talking about it in terms of dance.

"All movement is Siva's dance. When we fight this movement and think it should be other than it is, we are reluctantly dancing with Siva. We are stubbornly resisting, holding ourselves apart, criticizing the natural processes and movements around us. It is by understanding the eternal truths that we bring all areas of our mind into the knowledge of how to accept what is and not wish it to be otherwise... (Isn't that nicely said? '...how to accept what is and not wish it to be otherwise.') Once this happens, we begin to consciously dance with Siva, to move with the sacred flow that surrounds us, to accept praise and blame, joy and sorrow, prosperity and adversity in equanimity, the fruit of understanding."

Thank you very much. Have a wonderful day.

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This Lord of Obstacles prevents us from hurting ourselves through living under an incomplete concept or making a request unneeded or beginning an endeavor not well thought out.